


Arms Without a Body

by Brotherwife (AnamaryArmygram)



Category: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
Genre: Alternate Hollywood History, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Movie Night, New Year's Eve, Post-Canon, Sad Fluff, Starts Out Depressing But Hopefully Doesn't Stay That Way, The Man with the Golden Gun - Freeform, The Winter's Tale - Freeform, drunk on champagne, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-12 00:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20162440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnamaryArmygram/pseuds/Brotherwife
Summary: On their first New Year's without Rick, Cliff and Francesca drink and reminisce.





	Arms Without a Body

He'd made it to Christmas. Cards opened from the hospital bed, small gifts of food and memorabilia unwrapped. Grateful? Happy? More docile than usual, anyway. That mercurial discontent – the thing that made Rick Dalton, Rick Dalton – might've been frozen in a lump inside him. It might've still been there. But it wasn't showing anymore.

Not technically senile, not so old a man. It's funny the things that cancer takes away.

* * *

He didn't make it to New Year's Eve, which left Cliff and Francesca on their own in that house. House full of memories. That felt like a shitstupid thing to say, but then again it _was_.

Neither one of them felt like ringing in 1980 with a party. Go figure. But both of them wanted to get drunk. On champagne, why the hell not? Call it a celebration of life.

The funeral, scheduled for January second, would be a big deal, and that meant it would be unbearable.

Cesca was all in black. Turtleneck and palazzo pants, because in recent years she'd gotten self-conscious about both her neck and her legs. Cliff had dredged up a black t-shirt to match.

The champagne made his Italian better and her English worse.

(Don't worry, they don't hook up this time. Tonight is all about Rick.)

Some time before eight, two hours into the drinking, the Betamax tapes came out. 

Cesca made the first pick: Rick as Leontes in _The Winter's Tale_, with that hard-won British accent the critics had admired so much. From a distance of nine years the accent didn't sound so impressive, but it wasn't the main attraction to begin with. He had a face like a silent star. Television, with its square, obvious framing, had capitalized on that by happenstance, but it took Roman Polanski, of all people, to bring it out deliberately on the big screen.

The Polish director had talked about doing a second Shakespearean picture, maybe one of the tragedies. But after _Winter's Tale_ bombed, there wasn't a chance.

More champagne, and what next? Cliff pulled out _The Man with the Golden Gun_. A nice, meaty role. A heavy, sure – a heavy's heavy, with a midget henchman to boot – but in movies the stigma's not the same.

He'd needed a stunt double for that one, just for a scene or two. A young guy named Bruno Sinclair. He was good, too (even two-fifths of the way to blotto, Cliff watched the kid's work with a professional eye) but he wasn't a keeper. After Cliff's injury, Rick had never worked with the same stuntman twice.

The movie skittered forward – weirdly, discursively, the series's baggy plotting already setting in – and then came Rick's big moment, that wonderful speech: “Can I say my prayer, mister?”

That long suspenseful track in. And then _bang bang bang_ and it became the John Gavin Show again.

Cliff set the tape to rewind while Cesca fetched another bottle of bubbly out of the fridge. She had been drinking too fast, had gotten a bit sloppy. She couldn't get it open by herself.

It was fifteen minutes to midnight. “_Tratteniamo_,” Cliff said. He wasn't sure how he knew that word – “let's hold off” – or whether all the syllables had come out in the right order.

And he thought _Cesca_ was drunk.

They sat together, side by side on the sofa. Arms without a body, feeling the absence between them. They'd both lived there for a decade, but it was still Rick's house all the way – a little more overstuffed than it used to be, the private shrine of a man in love with his own mortal face. Someday, maybe, some of the stuff would have to go. Someday they'd both have to move out, maybe even move on.

But not yet, please dear God not yet.

Cliff toyed with the idea turning on the TV, catching a little of the revelry. It was traditional, after all. But in the end, the only countdown came from the clock on the wall.

He popped the cork and they toasted. It was strange not to feel the weight of Rick leaning on them. Maybe they'd have to learn to lean on each other, just to keep from floating away.

**Author's Note:**

> Just to keep things straight: In my version of what happens after the events of _Once Upon a Time in Hollywood_:
> 
>   1. Francesca stays with Rick, and Cliff moves in with them 
>   2. Roman Polanski makes _A Winter's Tale_ instead of _Macbeth_ (and, incidentally, makes it through the '70s without committing any major crimes) 
>   3. _The Man with the Golden Gun_ is still the ninth James Bond film, but it stars John Gavin instead of Roger Moore and it keeps more details from the original novel 
> 
> Point two is legitimate alternate history: Polanski doesn't have the tragic motivation that led him to want to make _Macbeth_, and is generally a less messed-up character. Point three is strictly change for change's sake; in our reality, Gavin was considered for the part but rejected for not being British, and I don't know how anything in _OUATIH_ would ripple out to affect _that_.
> 
> Oh, and I know the ending is a tiny bit rushed on this fic, but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
